Candide était étendu dans la rue et couvert de débris. Il disait à Pangloss: Hélas! procure-moi un pen de vin et d'huile; je me meurs. Ce tremblement de terre n'est pas une chose nouvelle, répondit Pangloss; la ville de Lima éprouva les mêmes secousses en Amérique l'année passée; mêmes causes, mêmes effets: il y a certainement une traînée de souphre sous terre depuis Lima jusqu'à Lisbonne. Rien n'est plus probable, dit Candide; mais, pour Dieu, un peu d'huile et de vin. Comment, probable? répliqua le philosophe; je soutiens que la chose est démontrée.
Candide perdit connaissance, ... et Pangloss lui apporta un peu d'eau d'une fontaine voisine.
Voltaire, Candide.
§ 1
Dialectics round the Death-bed
Philosophical aloofness is all very well in its way, but while we argue about economic causes and attempt to induce a philosophy of earthquakes, our bright young democracy lies bleeding under the ruins. The urgent necessity is a little first aid, a little cessation of the killing. I don't know how many young men in different parts of the world have been deliberately and scientifically murdered during the writing of this protest. England alone, who has been criticised for her delay in exposing her youth to the slaughter, is having about half a million of her best citizens stabbed or pierced or crushed or mutilated or poisoned or torn to pieces in one year[64] of modern warfare. And life is not the only instrument of vital progress that is being thrown away. Britannia has beaten her trident into a shovel, and with it is shovelling gold; and not only gold, but youth and love and happiness into the deep sea. The belligerent nations are frantically engaged in destroying two thousand years of education and all the accumulated capital of humanity. Only the enemies of civilisation, the sellers of arms and the sowers of hatred, are growing rich on its ruins. It is impossible to deny that the longer the war continues the greater will be the subsequent sufferings, spiritual and material, of every nation engaged. It is impossible to maintain that any nation or class or individual will be any better in any respect for the Great War, with the single exception of that parasitic class who, as a class, and therefore perhaps not consciously, are chiefly responsible for its inception. We must have Peace first and congresses afterwards. The survivors of civilisation cannot discuss a lasting settlement while they are still under fire.